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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I would like to speak before the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, decides what to do with his amendment. I am grateful for the response given by the Minister to my amendments in the group. We have here another illustration of the wide gap between commercial application and the way this is to work in theory. In my example, I referred to a company that wants to extend a site. It may be a subsidiary of a larger company or a group. The main company or group needs to expand the subsidiary for good commercial reasons. It wishes to make sure that the subsidiary is successful, which requires expansion of the site. For that, planning permission is required. It is controversial for all the reasons that planning permissions are controversial. We are all familiar with those. It is wonderful in theory but hopeless in practical terms to suggest that, somewhere further up the chain, the company would need to seek a resolution from the shareholders to authorise a subsidiary to spend some money on an advertising campaign to press the case for planning permission so that a factory can be built. I hope that the Government will think about the implications of this for the way UK plc operates. I understand what the Government are driving at here, but the way this has been drafted and then interpreted by our professional and expert advisers—along with the way that I and my noble friends know—does not mesh with the way commercial life operates. Of course I do not intend to press the amendment—